WITH the next Scottish Parliament elections only a few months away, Scottish Conservative Leader Ruth Davidson will be counting down the days she has left as a representative of our great city after announcing that she plans to head east to stand for election in Edinburgh instead.

Throughout her leadership, Ruth has been doing her best to show how much the Tories have changed, shedding the old image of the ‘nasty party’ and telling anyone who’ll listen that the Tories are now very different.

But behind all the spin and friendly photo shoots, it’s become clear over the last few months that nothing has changed at all.

The ‘nasty party’ is back and doing all it can to hit working people across the country.

Following their election victory earlier this year, the Chancellor took an axe to the Tax Credits millions of working families rely upon; 50,000 of whom live here in Glasgow are are now set to lose an average of £1300 a year.

And how did Scottish Tories react?

Well they didn’t, they simply stood by and let the Chancellor do his worst, failing thousands of children across the city who will be the real losers under these draconian changes.

Tax Credits – introduced by Gordon Brown, a Labour Chancellor - have helped make a difference to the lives of thousands of working families, lifting children not only here in Glasgow but across the whole of the UK out of poverty.

We can’t afford to turn back progress and that’s why Labour is calling on the Tories to ditch their unfair plans before thousands of the poorest children are plunged back in to poverty.

Despite their rhetoric, the Tories are wilfully attacking the most vulnerable in your local communities. Preaching austerity and budget cuts for working people and pension relief and tax cuts for millionaires.

And no matter how it’s spun, the Chancellors ‘National Living Wage’ isn’t a real Living Wage and will be swallowed and more by the money he is clawing back through lost Tax Credits.

The Chancellor’s ‘living wage’ of £7.20 is already less than the £7.85 Living Wage we pay here in Glasgow.

I am immensely proud that Glasgow City Council has led the way with the implementation of the Living Wage for all council staff, also working with over 370 organisations and businesses across the city to raise the wages of more than 79,000 workers.

In 2009 we took the bold decision to introduce the Glasgow Living Wage and now we have gone further, altering the Council’s procurement strategy so that it gives a material advantage to companies which paid the Living Wage, didn’t have a history of blacklisting or utilise exploitative zero hours contracts.

We did this not because it is easy or because we had to; but because it was the right thing to do.

The Scottish Government has followed our lead and become a living wage employer but progress has been painfully slow since then.

Despite pressure from the opposition parties at Holyrood the SNP joined forces with Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories to block the plans that would have seen thousands of workers across the whole of Scotland benefit from the inclusion of the Living Wage n government procurement.

We know times are tough and we’re limited in what we can do to help.

But I will always look to use whatever opportunities we can to tackle some of the worst impacts on people across this city.

People don’t expect politicians from all the different parties to agree.

But they do expect us to stand up for the people we represent and do our best by them.

Ruth Davidson should have used her unique opportunity as Glasgow’s sole Tory representative to stand up for our city and demand that savage welfare cuts are stopped.

Instead she’s heading back along the M8 to Edinburgh and leaving Glasgow behind when it matters most.